How to unlink Dropbox devices to meet its new "free" limits

Dropbox just did a bad thing to its "basic" users, namely free users. The company has quietly added a new warning limiting these accounts to three devices. To use your Dropbox account on four or more devices, you must pay for the premium version of the service, which will cost you at least $ 9.99 a month or $ 99.99 a year.

If you already had a free Dropbox account before the change, there is good news and bad news. Dropbox will not disable any device if you exceed this new limit. So if you have 10 devices synced to a free Dropbox account, they'll all continue to work. Phew.

However, users with more than three devices connected to their accounts will not be able to synchronize new hardware until they have disassociated all but two devices to comply with the new limit. If you decide to purchase a new phone, for example, you will need to lighten your devices to access your files. Even for people who regularly use three devices (or less), this is likely to cause future problems and cause you to comply, become premium, or move away from Dropbox completely.

This means that you will probably need to spend time reviewing and disassociating some of your old devices. To do it on the web, sign in to Dropbox, click on the profile icon in the upper right corner of the window, then go to "Settings". In the settings menu, click on "Security" and then scroll down to "Devices". "Section, which displays all the devices you used to connect to Dropbox. If you are like me, the list will be very long.

In the future, if you have a free Dropbox account, you will want to develop a mental plan on how you plan to use the service. In other words, think about how you use Dropbox on a daily, weekly and even monthly basis: Where do you get the most frequent benefits? Where does it save you the most time? Where do you access your files a lot against with parsimony? Take all the elements, weigh them in your head and use them to help you choose which devices should have access to your account and which ones will not. It's a pain – and a stupid pain, given that we live so many in a multi-device world – but it will save you time and frustration when you move to the new limited life of a Dropbox user Free.